


Specter

by Merrie



Category: True Detective
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-17
Updated: 2014-10-17
Packaged: 2018-02-21 13:48:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,168
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2470472
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Merrie/pseuds/Merrie
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Seeing things.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Specter

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first fic in years. Any mistakes are my own. Thank you so much for reading!

The pothole that may or may not have been steered toward jarred the car enough so that it bounced the sleeping Rust Cohle’s head against the passenger window, causing him to startle away with a curse. 

“Rise and shine, Sleeping Beauty. We’re almost there,” his partner Marty Hard crowed from the driver’s seat. 

“Shit. Why’d you let me fall asleep?” Rust accused, scrubbing a hand first across his jaw—in need of a shave—and then through his hair—in need of a comb. 

“You don’t sleep. You just dream,” was Marty’s smug retort, spoken with the stoicism of a quote. Rust didn’t dignify the jab with a response, settling himself in his seat. He frowned as he felt a tugging on the left elbow of his dress shirt, turning in his seat to see what he’d gotten snagged on. The irritation died in his throat as his eyes caught sight of dark curls, a gummy grin, and blue eyes—the same one’s he avoided in the mirror. And the blood, of course. 

“Stop the car, Marty.” A distant part of his misfiring brain might have been proud of how calm he sounded. It wasn’t every day you were haunted by the visage of your dead daughter. 

“What? We’re almost to the house. Don’t flake out on me now, Rust. You promised.”

“Stop. The. Car. Marty,” Rust repeated firmly. Sophia was still tugging at his sleeve, clearly seeking his attention. In a weaker moment, or if she hadn’t been so obviously dead, he might have given in to her. 

He didn’t ask Marty to stop a third time, merely unbuckled his seatbelt and opened the car door, fully prepared to jump from the moving vehicle if necessary, anything to get away from the specter of his dead daughter. It didn’t come to that. 

“Christ Almighty you crazy son of a bitch. Fine!” Marty declared as he slammed on the breaks, the screech of tires on pavement over-loud in his sleepy neighborhood. 

Rust stumbled out of the car and onto someone’s lawn, the grass—wet from an early evening rain—staining the knees of his trousers. Sophia followed him of course, better on her chubby toddler legs in death than she ever had been in life. Rust turned over and sat in the grass, his legs spread out before him. “You’re not real. You’re not her. You’re a figment. Leave.” She didn’t leave.

“What the hell is wrong now?” Marty asked, turning the car off and coming round. It was only that Rust knew him so well that he could hear the worry beneath the exasperation. Two years ago the worry wouldn’t have been there. “You seein’ things?” The question was also a sign of a more recent understanding between them. 

Rust didn’t want to answer; didn’t want to admit that he was because admittance made it something other than an annoyance. Marty however, took his silence as acquiescence. 

“I thought you usually saw colors and shit. Or tasted them.” Marty moved closer now. “Which is fucked up, by the way. This seems more than that.” Of course he would choose now to exercise his not dull observational skills. 

“Born with the synesthesia. The visions are neural damage,” Rust muttered absently, his eyes wide and still fixed on Sophia who was using his bent knee for balance, gently patting at it with both of her blood-covered hands. 

How could he possibly describe to Marty what he was seeing? ‘Only my dead daughter,’ didn’t come close to fully illustrating the horror that he felt, or the terrible memory he’d been drawn into. The memory of his beautiful little girl, her dark curls matted with blood, her tiny face bruised and soft beneath his fingertips, her breathing shallow as half her chest was caved in. In his nightmares—waking or otherwise—her tiny lips mouthed ‘Daddy,’ before her blue eyes glazed over and she slipped into the coma she’d never wake from. 

“Rust,” Marty repeated, urgent now. Rust realized that he’d been gently smoothing the unruly bloody curls away from Sophia’s forehead, much to her ghastly delight. “You’re starting to freak me out more than usual.” Rust knew how he must have looked. Features pale, face wet with unintentional but not unexpected tears, caressing what to Marty looked like nothing but open airs. He took a breath and forced his hand back down to his side. Sophia started to cry, tears mixing in with the blood. 

\--

Marty looked over his partner, not knowing what the hell to think. They’d only been partners for two years, and in that time he’d learned that Rustin Spencer Cohle wasn’t right in the head on most days. On a good day he tasted colors and spoke complete and utter bullshit. On a bad day… Well there were times when he seriously wondered at the sanity of the bureaucrat who deemed Rust fit to carry a firearm. This was clearly a bad day, damn his luck to be witness to it. 

“You need to get up and off the ground. Whatever you’re seeing, it ain’t real and you know that. Now stop making a fucking scene in my goddamn neighborhood and pretend to be normal for once. Please. For me. Call it a favor.” 

“It’s Sophia. Since you asked.” Rust’s reply was muted, his entire countenance withdrawn. 

Marty pulled a wince. “You see her often?” He couldn’t help but ask the question, immediately regretting it. 

“Out of the corner of my eye sometimes. In the mirror. Not like this.” Cryptic bastard. 

“‘Like this?’” More regret. 

“Like when she…When the car… She was in my arms, Marty.” 

“Shit. You were there?” What terrified Marty the most about all of this, what caused him to ask the question he’d very much not like to have an answer to, was that the normally verbose Rust—he never shut the fuck up, really—was strugging for words, unable to express himself. And the idea that he’d been there when his kid’d died? Hell. No wonder he was so fucked up. Marty tried to imagine losing Audrey or Maise like that and couldn’t. 

“You don’t have to tell me. I don’t need to know. We’ll go back to my place, we’ll pass out candy for an hour or so and then I’ll buy you a drink. Sound fair?” He didn’t wait for a response, merely hauled Rust to his feet and directed him back to the car. He tried very hard not to notice the way Rust’s left hand was cupped in close to his chest, as if he were carrying someone too small to walk quickly or easily on their own. 

Rut was subdued in the car on the short drive to Marty’s house, but it wouldn’t last. It never did. 

And if Marty heard a child’s giggle or caught sight of a little girl covered in blood standing up on the back see smiling at him in the mirror? Well, that was only his imagination. Pretty sure, anyway.


End file.
